


big, blue butterflies

by softestrichie



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Bullying, Coming Out, Fluff, Homophobia, Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst, Love Confessions, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-16
Updated: 2019-03-16
Packaged: 2019-11-19 12:16:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18135632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softestrichie/pseuds/softestrichie
Summary: eddie has been outed at school and he just can't come to terms with it; he's sitting on the roof crying over banana cake with richie tozier when he thinks maybe he's ready to start learning.





	big, blue butterflies

**Author's Note:**

> my response to a request for some richie comforting a hurt eddie!

Eddie presses the tip-tops of his teeth into his knees, even though they’re grass-stained and bruised and the stinging nettles knitted rashes around ‘‘em, and looks down over the playing field like it’s all one, thick slice of funny-coloured pie. “You got any more banana cake?” He asks Richie Tozier in a wobbly voice - the first time he’s spoken to the boy pigeon-perched up on the school roof next to him in fifteen minutes. Eddie’s eyes are puffed like pastry, and Richie Tozier’s fingers are scrambling at the speeda light for the most crumbly, goldy wedge of cake he’d managed to fit in his lunchbox. It’s been a hell of a long week.

It usually gets bad in the summertime for Eddie; school. Something about the heat and the slow, husks of wind ‘round his classmates’ ankles that gets them bored, and twitchy, and, naturally, merciless. “When I get old enough I think I’m gonna move somewhere really icy cold, like Canada. The snowy parts up top,” he’d told Richie yesterday, staring at their sunburnt knees too shy to touch, all kicked out in exhaustion after gym class tennis in the thickest blaze of August. Eddie always pairs with Richie, even though pairing with Richie is the last thing anyone in their grade ever wants to do in these sticky, irritable conditions, as he has proven himself to be something of a grandmaster at missing every ball, tripping on his shoelaces - even his triple-knotted shoelaces - and injuring himself so badly that you hafta find a new partner within five minutes anyway. But Eddie doesn’t mind so much. He likes pressing his best, biggest bandaids on Richie’s thighs, and he likes it when he serves the ball so clumsy that it almost takes both of Eddie’s eyes out; he likes Richie. And he thinks that’s one of the private, pink-cheeked little clues of it all - that what others would roll their eyes at, in Richie, Eddie would feel his own grow ten, heart-shaped sizes. 

“But you’re so itty bitty, wind’ll blow right through ya!”

“Aye, and I remember my coat, unlike you. Remember I have a body to actually look after ‘fore I go flying out of the door. Really though, I hate the heat. Makes my legs all sticky ‘n’ nasty.”

Richie opened his mouth, then closed it, then took a look at those gleaming, peach-pie legs, and ended up flushed even deeper than he had been in the first place. Eddie saw this. He always sees. His tender-pink sixteen year old heart just won’t know what to do with itself if he really, properly lets himself process what it means yet; if he considers the fact that maybe his and Richie’s is a little bit of a love story, and the fact that would make Eddie happier than all the banana cake in the world.

(Eddie can’t cope with that.)

So he says, “c’mon anyways, you. Shorts are sticking to my ass, we’ll go get changed. I’ll race!” and shuts it all out for the millionth time in his life. This is partly how Eddie ends up crying into Maggie Tozier’s baking on the school roof next lunchtime, really, the fact that he is blindly, crushingly, humiliatingly in love with Richie, and that he doesn’t know how to think about it. Partly that, and the teeny tiny, red pocket diary left waiting for him the locker room, as they ran and giggled and bumped hips despite all the tiredness and the hot fog to get back to it. The page of it in the very middle; the page that says in ant-sized curlicue, ‘I think maybe sometimes I’d marry him’. The page he’d slapped out of sight and stuffed under his pillow out of sheer guilt, out of the sheer burn of his mother’s eyes through the wall into his bedroom next to hers, and had been deemed too unsafe to write ‘Richie’ on, but safe enough for a ‘him’. 

That was all it took. All that cruel, August sun needed to have the page, and all the other pages fanning out of the spine, strewn all over the locker room floor like the wake of a meteor shower. That was all it took to have the whole grade, the whole entire world, to see Eddie for who he was right to the very bone, before he’d really even had a chance to see it himself. When he’d gone thudding onto the curves of his knees, and felt the entirety of his gym class rank up behind his shoulders to read it, read all deepest, darkest grooves on Eddie’s brain, he’d felt his heart crash beyond his heels. 

A theft, in many ways; a loss. A real, funeral loss. 

Richie passes him the biggest slice of banana cake you’d have ever seen in your life, today’s lunchtime. One that’s the proper colour of beach sand and was something of the crown jewel tucked into that little tupperware case his mom had packed him for today, the one napkin he’d been dying to unwrap and tuck into since first period, but Richie thinks now that Eddie needs it much more than he does. Nobody has stopped looking at him for surely the last twenty four hours. Nobody has left him alone since that lonely, wedding-bell wish had come slipping onto the dirt of the locker room lino, and nobody would likely want to until at least the end of the semester. And it’s the first time in a long time that Eddie had been waiting outside Richie’s math class, to skip off to lunch with him, in floods of snotty, blotchy-nosed tears. Nightmare. 

“I’m sorry, I’m…I am sorry for not talking,” Eddie chokes through a nibble of it, making his little chest heave in a cough. He hasn’t used an inhaler since he was very small but still gets a bit tight here and there when he cries; tongue gets a bit too big for his throat. “Sorry, Richie. Strugglin’ to breathe.”

A clumsy hand reaches out for Eddie’s right arm, as it often does in the halls now, but always seems to veer off last minute out of nerves. Always seems to find a hole in his pants to poke at, a railing to tug on, a poster to run the rim of his thumb under to collect up the blu tac. This time, though, on the roof where it’s cool and quiet and closer to the tails of all the clouds, Richie takes Eddie’s arm in a grip gentle as Sunday mornin’, and he barely even flinches. He holds Eddie ‘round that funny, bracelet-ring of freckles over his elbow, and lets his fingertips buzz there, and says,

“Don’t worry about it, Tiny. You just eatcha lunch and I’ll just sit here next to you, ‘kay?” with his hand starting to shake. Richie’s little flinch is coming now; his face looks like a rather funny beef tomato and the fingers on Eddie’s skin are scrabbling but he keeps them there, ‘cause he knows Eddie needs them. He knows that Eddie privately likes to be touched like a birthday gift teddy bear, likes to be held and tickled and swept and squeezed, although he’ll never admit it; just have to watch his ears turn raspberry-coloured to know all of it and more. Just have to feel him turn to jelly in the middle of the night, when experimenting with this sort of thing is much easier, and Richie will know that the toughest little faerie he ever met has melted down into sticky, toffee sauce. 

“Okay, Chee,” Eddie hiccups. “You’re ticklin’ me.” 

“What?”

“Your fingers are doing the flappy thing. Tickly.”

Richie tips his shy nose down to his own hand, splayed ‘round Eddie like a creeper vine, and can’t help but let slip the teeniest tiniest giggle at his own shakes. It’s all a little bit funny that they ended up like this, actually; when they were very small the boys in their grade used to give ‘em stick for holding each other far too much. Linking their legs up on the bus, whispering over cut ‘n’ stick in art class with their lips right up to one another’s ears, always giggling, always gazing, always touching. And now it’s all come back at sixteen years old, Richie whisking the tiny, teary apple of his eye off up to the roof to hide from that very same stick, only now with his bones reeling at the very thought of their fingertips brushing. 

“Yeah…yeah, you like that, Spaghetti?” He titters. Eddie tilts his swollen cheeks across to show Richie that there is maybe, just maybe, something a little bit like a smile struggling its way over the curves of ‘em. His eyelashes have gone all fair and sticky and the skin just ‘round the top of them dark pink and his nose is running worse than a toddler’s; Richie couldn’t think of anything prettier. ‘Specially when his crayon lips give him a little, “yuhuh, I like it,” and all of a sudden, Richie’s tummy is falling over closer, and Eddie’s tipping backwards, and out of the black, they are nine years old again. Suddenly Richie is tickling up ‘round Eddie’s armpits and ribs and elbows and hips and they are somewhere else, somewhere beyond the sun entirely; somewhere there’s no gravity or people or air and only two, aching boys, squawking like geese and tipping their heads back in a kindergarten tickle fight. 

“Richie Tozier - you’re gonna make me - wet myself!”

Always been good at cheering Eddie up, Richie has; even though he is much more sensitive and jelly-tummied, he finds something sturdy at the bottom of his chest he otherwise never thinks of when Eddie needs him. Like the summer of eight years old, where the older boys used to play nasty games with the pair of ‘em as the heat wave reached its summit, and Eddie sometimes used to catch them by himself while trotting back from the games cupboard, with a skipping rope for Richie (they’d needed it for the faerie tightrope they currently had under construction). The Three Strikes game; give Eddie a little poke on the pudgy part of his tummy, “one for a bellyache, two for a belly-bug, and three’ll have it stick out even further.” Eddie usually would stamp his feet, you see, and whip his hands and holler, holler, holler his way out of these situations, while Richie would more likely cry and need to sit in the nurse’s office to ‘unwind’ for the next two hours of school. But there was something about this game that always had him howling for his mamma. Something ‘bout it that really, really hurt Eddie Kaspbrak. 

“Is it sticking out more?! I swear it is, look, it is!” Eddie would squeak himself hoarse, laying over Richie’s lap with the skipping rope forgotten in a funny pretzel shape at their feet, while letting his best friend put his much gentler, wonkier hands on that tummy of his. This of course wasn’t true; Eddie was jus’ built that way, built all soft and wide and pretty over the edges, and the only real issue was that they’d both just stuffed themselves silly with mini confetti donuts. Richie would sing, in his warbly voice, giving his own little pokes, 

“One for a rollercoaster-feeling, two for a full-of-ice-cream feeling, and three for big, blue butterflies.” 

And that would have Eddie quiet and calm as a mouse. 

Eddie’s starting to go quiet now, his shoulder blades all wobbly on that roof and Richie Tozier’s scratchy leg all slung over his so he can give him some more tickles. It is very innocent and clumsy and silly and, oddly, enough to have Eddie crying again. When he thinks of all those big, blue butterflies Richie has pressed into Eddie like a scrapbook; thinks of how high they’d loop-de-looped up his throat when he’d written that stupid, lovely, godforsaken little footnote of his diary, how fast they hit each of his hips like ping pong balls when Richie tickle, tickle, tickles his way across ‘em. Brown, popcorn curls bobbing up and down with giggles and the sun cutting in and out ‘round the back of them and Richie Tozier’s eyes aching with something Eddie would die just to put his finger on. 

(Love. It is love. 

Maybe Eddie might cope with that.)

Richie stops straightaway, hands either side Eddie’s pixie ears and pancake-pressed into the concrete; nose so close to Eddie’s that it’s giving it shy, half-intentional little nuzzles every time he breathes. “What’s wrong, bubba?” He asks, childhood nickname growing up between his teeth like a daisy. As though they still really are wrapped up in skipping rope at the end of the field; the trees all cool and the air all quiet and everything blank, everything clean and tidy. As though them having been in love for the last eight years is the easiest, simplest story they ever printed.

(Eddie can cope with that.) 

And _this_ is all it takes for Eddie to know, too, along with the rest of the world. _This_ is all it takes to clear the fog. Maybe that makes it not so bad; maybe if Eddie can understand himself, and understand Richie Tozier, and understand the thick, faerie tightrope tugging the two of them in at the chest, then it’s not so bad that other kids can too. Because Eddie does think maybe sometimes he would marry him, every inky twitch on that page rings true, rings louder than ever, and there won’t ever be any shame in that. There won’t ever be any shame in his hitching back his own tears, just now, just under the boy that’s been trying to make him smile since he knew he even had a paira lips, and lacing his fingers ‘round the back of Richie Tozier’s embarrassed, peony neck, whispering clear as sugar,

”I am very much in love with you, Richie.” 


End file.
